Thanksgiving can seem like a stereotypical American holiday, filled with images of family and friends gathered around tables overflowing with food. But harvest celebrations are far older than the United States. People have gathered in late autumn to enjoy the fruits of their labors for generations, long before the first Pilgrim arrived in the New World. The annual harvest feast is a time to look back on and enjoy the hard-earned comforts.

Remember the last time you tried to visit a website or pay a bill and the spinner just kept going and going? That site needed uptime monitoring! “Uptime monitoring” refers to the practice of tracking a website’s availability and performance quality over time. This type of monitoring includes services that report on the availability of a website or server. Monitoring tools ensure that your website or server is running smoothly.

Web performance isn’t just about how long a website needs to render all its page elements—it also covers techniques for monitoring an application’s runtime, user-defined transactions, component response times, and network requests. The important thing is using performance data to evaluate the success of your app or service, whether you’re trying to compare different versions or introduce new capabilities.

According to Orca Security’s 2022 Cloud Security Report, 59% of respondents received over 500 alerts a day, with more than 42% of them being false positive alerts. And 62% of them said it has contributed to employee turnover. With numbers like this, it’s no wonder why developers dread the false positive alert. They waste time, energy, and money for everyone in every technology space, whether it is cloud or web services. It’s time to change that.

Any modern organization depends heavily on the health of its network and servers. If a server goes down, it can seriously impact a business’s ability to provide services for clients and customers to get work done. If network admins don’t know a server went down, the problem could quickly worsen. No one may realize there is a problem until the support lines are loaded with calls, and everyone needs to scramble first to find the issue and then fix it.

Companies, like most things, rarely grow in a straight line. Plants will take root where they can, and send shoots where they can to get the most sunlight, even if there are obstacles in the way. But vines and branches aren’t known for their efficient pathing, which can make a tangled mess of the whole plant. So get a good sun hat and some pruning shears ready; you’ll need them today! The difference between organic and structured growth is one of purpose and planning.

Welcome to the companion post to So You Received an Alert. Now What? Last time, we broke down the process between receiving the Uptime.com check alert and figuring out what broke. Today, we’re going to show you how to communicate your efforts so that everyone – your end users, coworkers, and bosses – know what’s going on. Your first step is to update your Status Page, your central hub for incident management and communication.

Your phone buzzes with an incoming text message right when you’re about to start dinner. Inconvenient, but better than a 3 am call. It’s an Uptime.com Alert, and if you want to clear it before your dinner gets cold you need the right tools for investigation… If that scenario sounds familiar to you, then you’re in good (if tired) company.

If you’ve ever had a website or service go down as you were using it, then you’ll understand the irritation of a generic error message and a plea to “Be patient!” (if you’re lucky). It’s almost like they know they’re not telling you the full story. The companies that are on top of their outage game will have a prepared link or redirect to their Status Page (or at least, have one prominently displayed on their pages and social media) for times like these.